Home >> Your Questions About Genetic Engineering >> As a facebook user,anti-gmo groups & info are all over the place. I tried to find a pro-gmo group to "like" & cannot find one. Fortunately, I understand the need for gmo's but so many people are full of anxiety, worry, & concern. The common person needs t

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QAs a facebook user,anti-gmo groups & info are all over the place. I tried to find a pro-gmo group to "like" & cannot find one. Fortunately, I understand the need for gmo's but so many people are full of anxiety, worry, & concern. The common person needs t

Question submitted By: Terri Swarthout

As a facebook user,anti-gmo groups & info are all over the place. I tried to find a pro-gmo group to "like" & cannot find one. Fortunately, I understand the need for gmo's but so many people are full of anxiety, worry, & concern. The common person needs to be educated not only on gmos but what exactly is in the "natural" & "organic" foods that they promote. How come I have to search for pro-gmo info but anti-gmo false info is abundant even when not looking for it?

Based on your question, it seems that you are skeptical about the intentions and awareness of those of us who have dedicated our lives to researching and developing GM crops. I’d like to address your question based on my personal experience.

I grew up in southeastern Arkansas, in a small farming town named Dumas, where my grandfather, uncles and cousins were and still are farmers. I worked in the cotton fields every summer, scouting for insect pests so farmers knew when to apply insecticides. If the pest population was bad enough, farmers would spray insecticides two or more times a week. I left Dumas to go to college and eventually earned a PhD in microbiology.

After college, I went to work in the biotech industry. I remember, as Bt cotton was going through the regulatory process at USDA, my family kept asking when that product would be available because that meant fewer pesticide applications and less insecticide exposure to our family members and our farmworkers.

This product has a great impact on my understanding of my place in the world—to provide tools to help my family and other farmers. I applied for a job at Monsanto because I believed that using good science is the best solution to solve agriculture problems like controlling weeds, insect pests and plant disease. Monsanto was the leader in developing GM crops, and I wanted to be part of it.

I’ve been at Monsanto for 17 years, and the progress made in agriculture is staggering compared with what I experienced in the 1980s. Without the ability to use GM crops, farmers would still need to control weeds, insect pests and disease. For most, that would mean quitting farming or going back to applying pesticides two or three times per week.

Over Christmas this year, my uncle and I were having a conversation about activists trying to get rid of GMOs. He asked why anyone would rather eat food sprayed time and time again with pesticides, instead of using GM technology. To someone like him, who has farmed with and without GMO crops, it just didn’t make sense. I agree. For me, technology is the answer, not the problem.

Since Facebook pages are started by organizations based on their own agenda or by people based on a personal passion, it shouldn’t be surprising that agriculture and segments of agriculture seem outnumbered there. Remember, farmers are less than 2 percent of the general public. At the same time, there are some great pages that support agriculture in general and GMOs specifically. Here are some of my favorite ones that speak to GMOs/biotech crops:

While there might be some institutions with the capability to make these transgenic watermelon and coconut plants for you, that does not mean that you would be able to actually plant them out. First, the institution would need to have a Biological Use Authorization to work with recombinant DNA to make the vectors to transfer the genes. Then they would need to be able to do the tissue culture required to transfer the genes and regenerate whole plants again, which can sometimes be difficult.... Read More

I’m a genetic engineer. I’ve spent 30 years participating as a member of teams of genetic engineers, and I love your question. Most of us do indeed spend a lot of time inside the lab, but we’re not always sitting. Sometimes we dance!
Genetic engineering starts with an idea for a way to solve a problem, so I guess it starts with an understanding of the problems. In agriculture, for example, that means spending time to understand what’s happening on farms and... Read More

Other than research, our work starts at the design of a plasmid vector that contains a gene cassette that we want to introduce in a plant genome. Once the plasmid vector design is completed, it is synthesized by bringing together several DNA components together thru a bio-chemical reaction. When the plasmid vector is made, the several components are verified by restriction endonuclease digestion reactions and/or thru DNA sequencing. After this verification is completed, the plasmid... Read More

About the Expert

I grew up in southeast Arkansas and worked on farms every summer. My passion for agriculture led to earning a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Georgia studying the interaction of soil bacteria with plants. After a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota, I worked as a biotechnologist at USDA. At Monsanto, I’ve worked as a Regulatory Affairs Manager for...

About the Expert

My passion for agriculture started in college with my first visit to a cotton farm to interview a farmer for a magazine, and I have never looked back. As a city girl, I have gotten lots of opportunities to ask questions that may not be important for farmers but were interesting to me. Decades later friends and family are amazed that the passion has become an integral part of who I am, not just...